Life Online – The Internet Enhanging Work and Place

Life Online

The internet enhancing work and play

Lee Rainie, Pew Internet and American Life Project

Who’s blogging this?

• Writing of a Loud Librarian
• Stephen’s Web
• Freedom to Connect conference

• IRC channel while speaking

• sometimes people say some unusual things

Time cover story – “Are kids too wired for their own good?”

8 realities of their lives

1. Millenials are a district age cohort, according to many measures of generational behavior and additude
• Millenials Rising
• larger than baby boomer cohort
• ethnically diverse
• special
• sheltered
• confident
• team-oriented
• achieving
• pressured
• helicopter parents
2. conventional
3. tech-embracing
• digital natives
• new and different expections about how to gather, transfer, use information
4. Millenials are immersed in gadgets and media
• generation “M” (media)
• 50% have broadband
• 97% TV
• 87% video game console
5. home media ecology has change drastically since 1975
• expect to be able to gather and share information on multiple devices in multiple places
• “if they can’t be with the device they love they love the device they are with”
6. Technology for Millenials is model
• 37% have MP3 players
• 13% have handheld devices
• laptop w/ wifi 26%
• PDAs 11%
• constantly interacting and forming “smart mobs” share information in ways that allow them to act quickly without top down management
7. The Internet plays a special role in their world
• not more intense internet users
• use internet to get different types of information
• tv/movie info, online games,
8. manipulate, share and remix content online
• artwork, photos, stories, videos
9. create work online for others (groups they belong to)
10. Personal webpage (My Space)
11. online journals and blogs
12. Steve Bartman’s Journey
• Cub’s foul ball incident in NL championship
• his info posted on the web
• Fark photoshop
• photoshoped it into various “bad incident” photos
13. approach research as a self-directed process
14. ranking and reputation systems to comment on creation of others
15. They are multitaskers
• Linda Stone – modern life is lived in a state of “continous partial attention”.  Not the same as multi-tasking. Constantly scanning for the single best thing to pay attention to (right now)
16. Millenials are often unaware of consequences of their use of technology
• oblivious to copyright and privacy
17. Their (our) technology world will change radically in the next decade
• in the middle of several technology J curves
• computing power
• communications power
• spectrum power
18. storage power
19. “The Long Tail” – Chris Anderson
• Amazon, Rhapsody/iTunes, Netflix
20. The environment itself will become smarter
21. The way they approach learning and research task will be shaped by their new techno-world
• self-directed
• less top-down
• better arrayed to capture mutliple inputs
• more tied to group outreach and knowledge
• more cross-disciplinary
• more oriented towards people being their own nodes of production